The Borca family relaxes after a working day that started early. Gheorghe (white shirt) and Anuța Borca (also in white) were married in July 1995, bang in the middle of the grass-cutting season. The honeymoon had to be shortened. “We started making hay again one week after the wedding,” Anuța says ruefully. This photograph was made in Maramureș, the Romanian-speaking part of northern Transylvania.

More sheep used to graze in the highest mountain pastures, but an increasing number of flocks now occupy fields near the villages. Some shepherds say that sheep in the lowland meadows are less beautiful, perhaps because thereâs less rain than in the surrounding highlands to wash them off.

Maria Cupcea, 30 (at left), stands in the hallway of the old house in Breb where her mother, Ileana Paul, 64, still lives. “I hope my children won’t continue to live in this village,” Cupcea says. “Life is too hard here.”

Sixty-three-year-old Mihai Țiplea has the help of his neighbors in Ferești to turn and dry the hay in his field. Work is shared, but each patch of meadow is individually owned and its boundaries carefully marked. Hayforks, made of hazelwood, the tines often polished by years of use, are handed down as heirlooms.

Vasile Cehi, nine, rests while the men of his family load hay onto a horse cart. Each cow requires about three full carts of hay for winter food. The red bow on his whip is a lucky charm for the horses. Red—found on bridles, harnesses, even a puppy’s collar—is thought to keep away evil spirits.

Wearing a heavy linen shirt and woolen waistcoat, Vasile Burnar attends Sunday Mass inside the ancient wooden church of Sts. Mihail and Gavril, built in the village of Mănăstirea Maramureș, in 1640. A current of deep attachment to tradition runs seamlessly from hay meadow to church pew.

Anuța Vişovan, 70, tends the fire at a still owned by her neighbor, in Breb, for making palinca, the plum, apple, or pear brandy whose name means simply “distilled spirit.” A fiercely delicious dram of it is given to every visitor. “When the first thing you do is have some palinca,” Lorinț Opriş, mill owner at Sârbi, says, “you know it’s going to be a good day.”

Andrei Rus, 12, relaxes in his father’s palinca still in Strâmtura. Palinca—the name for all kinds of fruit brandy—can be as much as 58 proof here. The stills require copious amounts of cooling water and are nearly always on the banks of streams—as are fulling machines, which use water-driven hammers to thicken up the fibers of woolen cloth.

In her parents’ house in Budești, Ileana Borodi, 24, minds her baby son, Ioan, nine months, while her daughter, Mărioara, three, occupies herself. Elderly family members often stay in older wooden houses, where walls are hand-painted with flowery designs. Younger people usually live nearby in modern homes built of brick and concrete, easier to heat and keep clean.

For about three dollars, you can rent time at this privately owned wooden washing machine in Sârbi, Maramureş, never more popular than when cleaning household rugs the traditional way—with surging river water—for Christmas or Easter.

Corn is shelled, then fed to the cattle. Ion Petric and his wife, Maria Vraja, who live in Breb, help out their neighbors’ daughter, seven-year-old Adriana Țânțaş. Transylvanian family life and village life remain intimately bound up with the needs and services of farm animals.

Cooking up plum jam in the autumn is usually a manâs job. It takes eight to ten hours of uninterrupted stirring to make sure the jam on the bottom of the pot doesn’t burn. This grandfather from Sârbi wears the traditional small Maramureş hat. Anyone who sports one of these little hats in Bucharest will likely be laughed at.

Maria Covaci kneels at her husband’s coffin in the courtyard of their house in Strâmtura. No funeral in Transylvania is complete without a warning from the priest of the dire fate that awaits those who have not led a good life.

On the evening hillside outside Breb, alfalfa stacks stand sentinel. The roots of Transylvania go back at least a thousand years. The farming way of life will continue only if it is treasured and nurtured by the villagers and seen by Romania and the European Union as worth sustaining.